Teacher Testimonial: How Rap Genius Fixed My English Class: If you haven’t been following my interest in emerging annotation platform Rap Genius, you’re missing out. I like it. I like the annotation tools, complete with a simple Redditish flavor of Markdown, I like the casual copyright infringement (so sorry I uploaded your image to Imgur instead of hotlinking to it, but hey, that’s a courtesy, too). Anyway, they’re expanding. Poetry Genius. Rock music. And, inevitably, News Genius, although they don’t quite have the formula quite right there yet, mostly annotating speeches and public records, whereas I’d like to apply these tools to articles. Anyway. In this link, the Rap Genius platform is used by an English teacher to get his students to annotate Siddhartha.

The Guardian launched a UGC photo platform. This is relevant to my work. Read the comment thread on this and other related posts from around the launch to get an idea of some of the issues people enjoy debating on this topic.

Twitter is hiring someone to lead their News team, which is, more accurately, a News Partnerships team. Even more accurately, it’s a team heavily populated by brilliant and talented people I respect. This is not a job application. But somebody has to manage them, apparently. Much of the conversation around this job listing completely missed the point of the team and their role in driving adoption and increase of use of a product called Twitter at news organizations. It was silly.

Casual onlookers will have spotted some casual language in the public communication about Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr. I didn’t make the connection at first, but of course, “Fuck Yeah” is part of Tumblr’s history.